Posts Tagged ‘J.P Morgan’

When I was a kid there was a newspaper cartoon by Harry Shorten and Al Fagaly featuring ongoing scenarios about people doing the kinds of obnoxious things that get under our skin. The cartoon was “There Oughta Be A Law.” I guess the cartoons were funny then. Today, that title turns me off. Because when crooks break laws, government responds by developing new ones. Take for example Enron. It crashes, people are ruined. There oughta be a law! So legislators pass new laws to ensure another Enron cannot occur and in the course of it hamper the abilities of honest companies to conduct their business. Never mind that masterminds who created the Enron collapse went to jail under laws already on the books.

Does the financial industry need more government regulation? Government regulation. The horror of the ages. Urban legend tells us that regulations kill the life blood of American creativity, that “job creators” across this great nation of ours would be hiring workers by the bushel if weren’t for those regulations, which govern everything from workplace safety to environmental protections. And nowhere, the legend goes, does the hand of regulation have a more strangling effect than on our financial industry. And one of the most vicious pieces of legislation, the one that has kept the best and brightest helping to left our economy from the recession we now find ourselves in. When we talk about legislation of late, we talk of two things: J.P. Morgan and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The fact that J.P. Morgan lost so much of its investors’ money might seem to play up the urgency for bills such as Dodd-Frank, yet for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the J.P. Morgan crisis matters – pardon the pun, but I can’t help myself – not a whit. In fact, as he pointed out on a news show this week, somebody made money off the debacle, and …